I glanced at my watch. Some five minutes remained before Hans arrived. He’s a punctual fellow, never late. If he said he’d be there in forty minutes, he’d be there.
Magda turned out to be a woman of understanding after all. Though perhaps the understanding was added to by the barrel of a pistol pressed into her side while she told Hans over the telephone about the villain Arbalet, who had barged into the flat late at night and been shot dead on the spot by her own hand.
– Where do I put the corpse? – Magda wheedled out of Hans. – He’s splattered blood all over the place here. It’s horrible.
– Wait. I’ll be there in forty minutes, – said Hans and hung up.
Thirty-five minutes went by. In that time I tightened the ropes on Magda’s limbs and shoved her into the bathroom. Then I smashed the telephone to smithereens, locked the door of the flat, went downstairs, got into the red «BMW» (as expected, it was Magda’s car, she spilled it herself), started the engine so as not to freeze stiff in the cold, and settled down to wait for Hans to arrive.
Magda had warned me that he usually goes about with one bodyguard (oh yes, I know him, thick but sharp Helmut), but today he’d probably bring along another big lad to shift my corpse. Fine. One bodyguard or two – it’s all the same to me. I’ll have two seconds at my disposal. In that time five bullets fly out of my barrel. Two or three ought to find the target – the clever, bright, brilliant head of Hans, and after that…
I drove right up to the entrance and pulled the handbrake.
Hans would drive up and wouldn’t be able to park right by the entrance. He’d have to stop a little short and walk past me on foot. I’d jump out and from two or three metres, I reckon, I’d hit the head. Shooting at the torso is pointless, Hans even goes to wash in a bulletproof vest. He’s wary.
I too had rummaged through Magda’s wardrobe and found what I was after, but, alas, of an indecently microscopic size, and with some sort of frivolous darts at the bust into the bargain. In short, puny Magda’s bulletproof vest wouldn’t go on me. I spat on all precautions and decided to go into my last job travelling light. We’ll break through. It can’t be otherwise. What’s that?…
Hans is coming!
Past me – I barely had time to duck – rustled a silver «Mercedes». I wiped the sweat from my forehead, swallowed my saliva, opened the door a crack, the one I intended to leap out through, and through the frantic thumping of my heart tried to make out footsteps. Aha, they’re coming. I gathered myself and sprang out of the car.
Got him!
I threw up the pistol and fired three times from the «Colt» clamped in my right hand into Hans’s face, which had turned up a metre and a half from me. From that distance I don’t miss. Blood spurted over me, over his guards – three of the ugly mugs! While they were starting up, digesting what had happened, reaching into their pockets for their guns, I fired five more shots each from the «Colt» and from the «Makarov» clamped in my left hand. Like in a cowboy film. In short, I coolly shot down all four gangsters – no business hanging about Moscow! – and jumped back into the car. The moment I came off the handbrake, the windscreen was covered with a fine web of cracks with a round hole in the middle, and something like a red-hot rod was laid against my right shoulder. No, more as if my right shoulder had been struck full swing with a red-hot crowbar. I was thrown back. The pain nearly deprived me of consciousness. Yet with my right foot I squeezed the accelerator, and with my left hand, which had grabbed at my right shoulder, I managed to wrench the wheel round and, tyres screeching and squealing, tore away.
What was that?
Another nasty crack rang out.
Er-er-er, they’re shooting!
Who?!
I did for the lot of them!
I swung out onto the avenue and only from there noticed a young lad with a rifle in his hands. Belting away at me, a sniper. Good thing his marksmanship was nothing special. Only one bullet found its target. What’s this? The lad hops into a black «Lada 2108», and it races after me? Another chase? Damn!
Everything was supposed to have gone differently. Having shot Hans down, I’d intended to head unhurriedly towards the Belorussky station, buy myself a little ticket to Wünsdorf there and cross the border tomorrow morning. And here it turns out they’ve opened the hunting season on fine fellows like me. Not the done thing.
I began feverishly working out where the lovers of fresh Arbalet-meat had sprung from. Incomprehensible. There shouldn’t have been any such thing, but there you are! Look in the side mirror: they’re catching up!
What a life. Running away again, and the wheel jumping about in my hand.
A sharp pain pierced the right side of my body. I felt a slight dizziness and shifted my gaze from the road to my shoulder. Blood was gushing as if from a bucket. In five minutes, if I didn’t get a dressing on it, I’d float far, far away on the swooning waves of a consciousness taking leave of reality.
I turned off the avenue towards some grey building with neither windows nor doors, a factory for certain. Calmly I steered the car at the iron gates and knocked them out with a hellish crash. I rolled in, scattering the old biddies on the gate, onto the grounds of what was now definitely some sort of industrial works. I twisted along the narrow internal factory roadways and, when my pursuer disappeared from the plane of the side mirror, stopped the car. I quickly clambered out and made for the open doors I had marked out in advance in a little three-storey building nestled against the hulk of the production block.
Behind the doors was a staircase. Clamping the wound with my hand, I ran up it to the top floor, where I discovered some long echoing corridor. Where did it lead? Unknown. I went along the corridor, dropping spots of blood on the floor and slowly working out that this was most vexing. My pursuers would find me by the bloody trail and make veal escalope of me, steak with the blood in. All right, never mind. If only I could bind up the wound. I’d lost blood enough. The hallucinations would be starting soon.
Staggering, I made it to the end of the corridor and tugged at the door handle. Locked. No keys. What to do? Think. And my head’s spinning, spinning, spinning. Stop. For a few seconds my consciousness cleared. I kicked the door. The door flew open. Behind the door there turned out to be nothing. Almost the very same staircase, only going down.
I shut the door behind me, squatted down, pulled off my jacket, my jumper heavy with soaked-up blood, then my vest, and nearly lost consciousness for good. I’ve seen plenty of corpses in my life, but one’s own wound – that, I have to report, is a sight not for the faint-hearted. Good thing the bullet went straight through. A calibre of seven sixty-two, no doubt about it. Right. So the little bullet went straight through, and what about the bone now? Touched or not? The arm won’t move. Unbearable pain is wrenching at my right side. Maybe a couple of bits of cartilage are shattered too. Sad. How am I to bind up this equipment? Where does one apply the tourniquet? Tighten it round the neck? An interesting thought, and a timely one…
I tore up the vest and wound it as best I could round two wounds of the foulest appearance. Mangled meat was peeping out, blood seeped in pulses. You could die of disgust. In short, I got a dressing on myself and breathed in plenty of air so as not to lose consciousness by accident. Before long I heard the rapid thunder of footsteps along the corridor. That was for me.
I took the «Makarov» found at Magda’s into my left hand and changed the magazine with the help of my teeth. Got ready.
The moment the door flew open – six shots point-blank and two finished bodies on the floor.
I got up heavily, took the dead men’s weapons – two «TTs» – then peered into the face of one of them. Strange. It seemed I’d seen him. Exactly. It was the guard I’d wanted to test for sharpness. How had he got here? From where? Had Mamon decided to take revenge on me? But how? How had he managed to work out where I was? Yesterday I shook off the chase cleanly. Nobody followed me after I sank two of Mamon’s crews. Damn! Something here isn’t right.
I went slowly down the staircase, but got only as far as the second floor. From the street came voices: «Search these buildings! First section to comb the workshop, second – the administrative block.»
What?!
I leaned my back against the wall. If the pursuers are being counted in sections, I’m not getting out of here alive.
With great difficulty I held myself on the surface of consciousness, turned round and, treading heavily, began to climb back up. I’d be able to hold a defence there for three minutes. Then…
And what’s this? I pushed at a door that had appeared from goodness knows where and thought that problems had begun with my eyesight. Everything around was misting over, vanishing, appearing, vanishing again. All right. What’s there behind the door? It opened and revealed yet another corridor.
Let’s go along it, there’s nowhere else to go.
I looked down at my feet. Aha, the blood isn’t running off me any more, but my boots are leaving suspicious tracks. We’ll take note of that. I went forward along the corridor and behind the next door found myself in a glass gallery, visible from every side. I see. The gallery led from the administrative block to the production one. That’s where I need to be. Among the machines and units it’s easier to get lost. I glanced down and was dumbfounded. Beneath me stood five police cars. Purposeful men in helmets and bulletproof vests were darting to and fro. Beside a massive fellow in a maroon beret shifted from foot to foot – it can’t be! – Mamon.
The police in league with Mamon? That’s some sort of delirium.
I stood a while, digesting what had happened. Didn’t digest it. I caught my breath and, stepping awkwardly on legs that had grown heavier, trotted along the little gallery, in full view of one and all, into the production block. My hunters, astonished at such insolence, did nothing, following me with their eyes in silence. Only when I was out of their field of vision did the resonant cracks of shots ring out. But I was out of reach. For now.
How long could I fight off a combined police-and-bandit detachment? A minute? Two? I know for certain, not long.
Only it’s interesting – how did I set myself up? How?
Down below a loudhailer thundered, inviting me to surrender.
A good thought, but it seems Mamon takes no prisoners. They’ll bump me off while attempting escape, and I do want to live. I trudged slowly along beside some pipes.
My story was ending sadly, on a minor note. Right now they’d given me a minute’s time for reflection, and then there’d be the assault, there’d be a nice little victorious war – forty against one.
Stop. What’s this?
In a white, rather attractive pipe I saw something resembling an opening. Exactly. A ventilation pipe. Where did it come out? I traced it with my eyes and discovered that the pipe led somewhere out of the workshop.
Nothing else for it. I sighed, climbed up the stepladder to the pipe and crawled inside, trying not to smear my blood over the surroundings. Seems I managed it. I crawled along the pipe for a hundred metres or so, then fell down somewhere. Found myself in yet another hangar, empty, cold, echoing. I looked around. The pipe led on somewhere further, and I was sprawled on a heap of sand under a hatch. A strange pipe, hatches all the way. Probably it isn’t a ventilation one after all. Then what is it?… A pipe for Arbalet… Arbalet in a pipe… My goose is cooked.
Stop. Am I losing consciousness? I must breathe in air, lean against the wall and get my breath back. Another breath… Another… Aha. There. Oxygen has gone to the brains. We begin to think.
They’ll work out where I am in about two minutes. In that time I have to clear off further still. Where to? I went up to the door and through the crack saw policemen surrounding the huge great block and waiting for me to come out with my little hands up in the air. Let them wait. I went the other way. Damn. There were no doors there. Seep along that same pipe again? Though there’s a better proposal.
I gripped a heavy hatch in the floor with my left hand and shoved it aside. You can make your way along a pipe as long as you like, but it’s hardly going to lead you off the factory grounds. Whereas the sewer is designed precisely for floating all manner of rubbish out of sight. Let’s try seeping out that way.
I tried.
Stank myself out in the process, but tried all the same. Constantly slipping and sinking into the filthy sludge, I plodded half a kilometre of unbroken cold darkness and muck. Then I felt the muck slowly rising to my knees, to my waist, to my chest, gripping my breath with a graveyard chill and stopping my heart. My body was wrenched and aching. I raised my stiff, frozen left hand and felt for the ceiling. There it was, right beside me. The sewer passage went downwards. Another ten steps and I’d be up to the crown of my head in shit. Go back? They’d shoot me. Drown here? Unpleasant. I leaned against the wall and heard the sound of water. Not the muck bubbling around me, but water precisely. A splash, a murmuring, as though somewhere nearby a spring brook were breaking out. I took some five steps, struggling to keep my two breathing holes above the level of the surrounding shit. Seemed I managed it. Now there was definitely something murmuring ahead of me. I filled my lungs with air and – here goes nothing – plunged down and forward.
Ten seconds later I was floundering on the surface of some filthy pond that received the drainage waste of the works I had just run away from. Good thing it was a day off today. I found myself surrounded by banal warm muck, and not by industrial effluent that makes your loins drop off and turns your skin a brownish-green shade.
With the greatest difficulty I got out onto the bank. My body was gripped by cramp. Some kind of death-throe nausea was turning me inside out. The pain in my shot-up shoulder had turned into a fiery hurricane that jammed my brains with one single thought: «To croak!»
No, we’ll fight on yet.
Squelching with the muck running off me, I walked towards the noise of a thoroughfare that reached me from somewhere above. Up the steep embankment I scrambled to the top and came out onto the road, right beside a fellow fiddling about by a «Zhiguli».
Here’s the very man I need.
I went up to him. The fellow shifted his gaze from the wheel he was levering off to me, and his lower jaw dropped the maximum distance nature had provided for. That’s the sort of shitty – in the literal sense of the word – appearance I had. I squelch with shit, I stink of shit, I’m covered all over with shit. Why be shy, I’m saving my life. And you, brother, get on with saving it too.
I trained my gun on him and barely stifled a smile – that same shit came trickling out of the barrel in a thin little stream.
– Take off your jacket, trousers and boots, – I whispered to him with numbed lips. My whole body was racked with a heavy shivering.
The fellow, it seemed, didn’t hear, but he guessed. He began feverishly tearing the clothes off himself. His woman, sitting in the car, took fright, started clucking and shrieking. I thrust the pistol up to the window and waved it under her nose.
The fellow pulled off his padded jacket, began undoing his trousers. I reckoned undersized jeans wouldn’t go on me. With one left hand I’d certainly never pull them up. In short, I waved him off, as if to say, no need, just give me the padded jacket. Then I got myself somehow clothed in something warm. Thanks to the uncle for helping me manage the sleeves.
– Done the wheel?
– Yes.
– Go on, put it back on and drive me to «Kaluzhskaya». I’ll pay well.
The fellow started shaking, shook his head, but I had a weighty argument. True, without any cartridges left in it by now, but who knows that?
I got into the car. To defuse the oppressive feeling hanging about the cabin, I fished a squelching wallet out of my squelching back pocket and opened it. Then I held out a hundred marks to the woman, so she’d stop lamenting and behave more calmly. That really did calm her down.
When we had driven a couple of kilometres and come out onto a busy street, I said:
– Stop, mate. I need to make a call. If you wait, I’ll give you all the money – there’s a thousand marks here. That’s the situation I’m in. Put yourself in my place.
The fellow did. No joke, a thousand marks – not a feeble sum. I got as far as the telephone, somehow fitted a token into the slot with my wooden left hand and dialled the number I had learned by heart three days before:
– Hello.
– Sashka?
– It’s me. Listen, I need to hole up for a day. I’ve landed in such a heap of shit, you wouldn’t believe it.
– Ah… Er… – Mila started bleating and hemming. Husband nearby, is he? Her voice is somehow trembling. – Better come round to a friend of mine, at mine I… er-er-er… I can’t, you understand…
Something has definitely happened to her voice, something is twisting her. Something isn’t right.
– Sasha, write down the address.
– Just say it, I’ll remember.
In any condition I’m ready to remember any words of yours, Milok. Every word of yours is gold, every smile of yours a diamond. Speak, speak, speak. Your speech is like a nocturne to me. Will I ever learn to play it with hands like these? Never mind. I shall live for you, so that you, Milok, can soar up to the sky and blaze there as the brightest star of all. I shall make you do it. With these very hands… with this very left hand I shall chain you to a writing desk and make you slave away day and night with a break for five hours’ sleep and three meals a day. You’ll become my champion at sifting verbal ore for the sake of a single word. You will become, you will become the One for whose sake one can meet death with a smile, in order to run about hundreds of years later as a fair-haired little lad on the soft grass and…
– Sash, repeat the address.
What? I roused myself, clenched my teeth so as not to vanish again into swooning oblivion, and hammered three words into my memory – street, building, flat.
I memorized the address and staggered back to the car. I informed the fellow that the plans had changed slightly and I had to be delivered to another place. Then I gave his woman all my damp cash. I’d promised, after all.
We drove off.
I looked out of the window, slowly warmed up and slowly, slowly, slowly floated away somewhere into the distance.
My relaxed, bloodless body was received by a stream of tender, kindly air, caressed in soft palms, reduced to the size of a five-year-old child and released to run across soft emerald grass. In my hand, from goodness knows where, appeared a crumpled little rouble. Laughing ringingly, I ran up to the ice-cream woman – kindly Auntie Faya – and on that fantastically enormous sum bought ice cream. My hands went numb with cold. Little pieces of ice sparkled like diamonds in the sun. Passers-by bestowed all-understanding and slightly envious smiles on me. Struck dumb by the surging wave of a wish come true, I ran and ran and ran back across the soft green lawn towards someone invisible. This someone was calling me: «Sashka!». The voice was kind, dear to the point of spasms in the throat, but I could not, could not see who was calling me. And I ran towards that voice without feeling my feet beneath me, ran pressing to my chest the ice cream that was melting, turning into a cold sticky gruel, running down my little shirt and leaving a sweet trail behind me.
Trouble. Trouble is coming. This dream is warning me, shouting to me: «Don’t go! Go back, into your childhood, in which there is only good and no evil, no blood and no violence. Stop!» But I fling open the car door, walk up to the building I’ve been driven to, repeat with whitened lips that have begun to die the address dictated by Mila. I climb to the third, yes, to the third floor. I press the bell push. The door flies open, and I find myself inside an empty echoing flat.
A woman, soft, warm, beautiful, takes the padded jacket off me, leads me to a chair, seats me. Who is she? Through the veil of half-swoon I cannot see her face. It’s certainly not Mila. It’s the friend of hers I’ve come to? Why then is the voice familiar to me? Have I already been told: «Come in, handsome»? By whom?
Magda?!
I try to leap up from the chair, but all that comes out is a feeble stirring. There’s no strength at all. The only thing there’s enough for is to unstick my eyelids and see before me a black barrel that will spit out, will most certainly spit out a red-hot little lump of lead into the bridge of my nose.
– You turned out to be a capable lad, Arbalet. You carried it all out. Well done! – Magda pats me on the cheek.
Hush, you bitch!
I shake my head.
– It was enough to nudge you with a couple of hints. Hans is gone. Jurgen is gone. Now I give the orders in the firm. You were my secret weapon. Thank you. Thanks too for the firework display you laid on yesterday. Mamon took fright and agreed to my terms. That’s how it is, Arbalet.
– Where is Mila?
– I don’t know. Counting money, perhaps. Ten thousand marks – a good sum.
– You paid her to give this address?
– Yes.
– How did you find her?
– Can’t you guess?
I can. The number of her work telephone was the only seven-digit one in my notebook. And as for her home number, which isn’t written down anywhere, that’s simple too: the telephone I rang Mila at home from had a «Redial»* function. Doubtless, after my conversation with her, Magda made use of the chance to repeat the last number dialled and read it off the display.
– Yes, handsome, – the perceptive bitch read my thoughts. – I had a heart-to-heart talk with her. A woman always understands a woman. And you, incidentally, are an unfeeling swine. You turned up seven years later, screwed her in silence and drove off without a kind word.
Maybe so.
Forgive me, Mila. I wanted to teach you sense and reason, to initiate you into the rational life, to show you how success must be achieved. But you kicked over the traces, spat on all the calculations, and there you are, in that muddle-headed womanly way you sold me for a miserable ten grand. Afterwards you’ll shed tears, tear your hair, curse the minute when, bewildered and upset, you suddenly boiled over with a second’s hatred for me and swore to take revenge. In your foolishness you did what this bitch here proposed to you, having introduced herself, perhaps, as my wife, perhaps as an abandoned lover, or perhaps…
Never mind. The Western bitch bought your fury and turned it against me.
Did you know what would happen now? And will my dream – prophetic, I’d like to believe – come true across the streaming currents of time? Will a little boy run about on the grass, the happiest of all the people living and who have ever lived on Earth? Will there be anything worthwhile after death? Give me an answer, nine-gramme messenger from that other world.
There won’t be, there’ll be nothing. A short cry choked with blood, the black frost of emptiness and a fall into a dreadful bottomless chasm without faith, hope or love…
– We’re here. This is the place. Hey, Svetik, give him a shake. Passed out, seems. There, we’ve gone and got mixed up with an idiot, more fool us. Was that money he gave real?
– Real, with the strip, I checked.
– Hey, we’re here.
– What?
– There’s your building.
– Thank you.
I tumbled out of the car, struggling with weakness, with dizziness, with sharp pain, with the unwillingness to live after such a half-dream, half-swoon.
Will it be as I saw it? My presentiments have never let me down. Everything spoke for its being exactly so. Magda used me most expertly, made me her instrument. I was her weapon, striking precisely at the target. Damn!
So what awaits me in that flat? The hot whisper of the woman I love, or a pistol in the hands of a calculating, brilliant bitch? Am I to believe that love does not rust, that those we love are not betrayed, that life, merry and happy, will go on further still? Or should I let my hands fall, turn round and walk away, into the darkness and cold of the evening city, walk away from all my thoughts and feelings into the frost, the wind and the emptiness, there where there is not a single soul dear to me, where nobody needs me and where the happiest little person on earth long ago stopped running about on the grass?
What is to be done? Who will give an answer?